The Communist League, for which Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, was an international political tendency. It was disbanded following the defeats of 1848. Thereafter there have been four attempts to create a workers international organisation - 1st International, 1864/72; 2nd, 1889/1914; 3rd, 1919/33; 4th, founded in 1938.
The First International was initiated as a mutual aid association of British and French trade unionists, and transformed politically by the activity within its leadership of Karl Marx. In the struggle to forge a scientific ideological basis for the developing working-class movement, that organisation was torn apart in a conflict between Bakuninists and Marxists.
The Second International spanned the period of organic growth of the labour movement within the ripening capitalist system. Formally Marxist and dominated by the great centre of "orthodox Marxism", the "heir to the mantle of Marx and Engels", the German Social Democracy, it was in fact, certainly after 1900, organically tied, by its practice, by its routine, and by its conceptions, to capitalist legalism, and ultimately to capitalism itself. Its de facto accommodation to capitalism, common to both the outspoken revisers of Marxism and the "orthodox - the former intellectually more rigorous than their more prominent opponents like Karl Kautsky, in that they did at least try to square their theory with their political practice - revealed itself in a series of struggles, coming to a climax in 1914, when the capitalist powers went to war and the parties of the 2nd International backed their own capitalists, shattering the workers international into mercenary fragments at the service of the different national bourgeoisies. The slow evolutionary peaceful growth of the labour movement generated not only an accomodationist practice but also a vulgar evolutionist set of conceptions which militated against a revolutionary reorientation to meet the demands of the period of sharp conflicts and breaks - the period in which capitalism had ended its steady organic growth, and entered the heights of its imperialist phase of crisis and world war, when the need of the working class movement was, above all, for revolutionary action to overthrow capitalism. In the event both the vulgar Marxist concepts and the accomodationist 2nd International practice of the labour movement had to be revolutionised.
On 4th August, 1914, the major parties of the 2nd International betrayed socialism. From then until March 1919 when the 3rd International was proclaimed in Moscow, the communist internationalists, like Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Trotsky, worked to gather the forces for the new International, and to settle ideological as well as organisational accounts with the "stinking corpse of the 2nd. When the new International was proclaimed in 1919, with the declared goal of being the general staff of the revolution, it was on the programme of world revolution and war on capitalism and its agents and collaborators in the working class movement.
The 2nd International had been a diffuse structure united by no strategic, programmatic conception of the working class struggle. The "political" (Parliamentary) "struggle" was separated from the "trade union" struggles, and both were routinised. The 3rd International set out to weld the various fronts of the class struggle together according to the needs of a revolutionary strategy. The dominant idea of socialist consciousness of most 2nd Internationalists had been one of a gradual ripening in line with the ripening of capitalism. The idea that the class struggle takes place on the ideological as well as on the economic and political fronts had little influence except among the Bolsheviks. Strict ideological clarification and self-demarcation, and an active struggle for communist consciousness was to be the mark of the Communist International. The 2nd International had divided the minimum programme (reforms) from the "maximum programme (socialism); the Communist (3rd) International, organising itself fundamentally at the point of production, proposed a transitional programme to link up the daily struggles of the working class with the struggle to conquer power. The Second International s "internationalism had been confined mainly to the parties of the "white and advanced parts of the globe; in its attitude to the colonies and oppressed peoples it was nearer to bourgeois cosmopolitanism or even what would be called in a later period, liberal imperialism, than to genuine proletarian internationalism. The 3rd International reasserted the internationalism of Marx, as an outspoken champion of the national rights, including the right to national struggle, of the peoples and nations oppressed by imperialism. "The nationalism of the oppressed is not the same as the nationalism of the oppressors", they proclaimed, concerned that the principles of communism should not be bowdlerised as they had been by the Europe-centred 2nd International.
"What characterises Bolshevism on the national question is that in its attitude toward oppressed nations, even the most backward, it considers them not only the object but also the subject of politics. Bolshevism does not confine itself to recognising their 'right' to self-determination and to parliamentary protests against the trampling upon of this right. Bolshevism penetrates into the midst of the oppressed nations; it raises them up against their oppressors; it ties up their struggle with the struggle of the proletariat in capitalist countries; it instructs the oppressed Chinese, Hindus or Arabs in the art of insurrection and it assumes full responsibility for this work in the face of civilised executioners. Here only does Bolshevism begin, that is, revolutionary Marxism in action. Everything that does not step over this boundary remains centrism."(Trotsky, "What Next?" in "The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany", p.203.) The effects of this mighty assault on white metropolitan chauvinism were felt even by the US blacks.
The new International was launched while the big majority of the organised socialists were not yet ready to accept its principles, with revolutionary Russia as its main base of support. It was in fact attempting to organise itself as a whole series of working class revolts erupted, provoked by war and the convulsions of capitalism. A process began within the French, Italian and German Social Democracies which was to lead to the majority of these parties accepting the programme of the Communist International: majorities which included bureaucrats and corrupt elements like Marcel Cachin, a patriot in the war, who would have gone wherever the majority went.
This delay in the reorganisation of the socialist movement in the CI led to the defeat of the workers upsurge after the war. A series of defeats followed - Germany, Hungary, Italy - leaving the one victorious workers state isolated in the primitive backwardness of Russia. A privileged bureaucracy developed within Russia, and thus in the leading party of the new International. In 1924, after the death of Lenin, the bureaucracy swamped the revolutionary party of Lenin by recruiting tens of thousands of careerists and opportunists to the party, freeing the now bureaucratic party machine from the control of the revolutionaries in its ranks. This Stalinist bureaucracy extended its control from the leading party to the whole Communist International, imposing an increasingly bureaucratic regime, and utilising both the careerist elements carried over from the old labour movement and the inescapable weaknesses of the new international, which was still in the process of constructing itself and clarifying itself. A series of gross blunders by the parties of the International covered up in bureaucratic self-protection by the dominant faction, perpetuated the isolation of the Russian workers state. Ultimately the bureaucratic bunglings were to shade off into conscious betrayals by the leadership of the Third International and to destroy it as a revolutionary organisation.
